- A Realtor's Facebook video went viral showing swarms of people arriving to look at a $260,000 home.
- "People are so desperate for a home under a particular price point," the agent said.
To get a vivid picture of the housing inventory situation facing many parts of the US, look no further than a recent Facebook post from a realtor in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Shortly after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Monique Edwards was wrapping up a showing with a client at 4509 Lafferty Ct. when she paused to make a video showing the lines of cars and people arriving to look at the newly listed home.
"Someone stopped me and they wanted to know what was going on in the neighborhood, and I just told them the truth. I said, we're having a housing crisis," Edwards said in the video.
While the property itself was reasonably attractive, Edwards said the frenzy was a response to the comparably affordable price in an area where the median home value recently hit $400,000. That's a bit higher than the national median price, which ticked up to an all-time high of $365,000 in January — increasingly out of reach for the average US worker.
"This is a home that is priced under $300,000 here in the Raleigh area, and as you can see, there are just cars, upon cars, upon cars — and there are a ton of people that are trying to see this home," she said.
"People are so desperate for a home under a particular price point because people don't make as much money," she added.
The original Facebook video captured more than 6,400 reactions, 7,000 comments, and 16,000 shares of the, and went viral on other platforms like Reddit, as well, but Edwards told Insider the scene was "more common than you think."
"It's an open secret [in Raleigh], I just decided to tell it," she said.
The immediate neighborhood surrounding the Lafferty Ct. house is fairly working-class, Edwards explained, but a wave of newly arriving buyers is driving prices out of reach of local incomes. Meanwhile, homes at higher price points tend to have less competition.
Less than 24 hours after posting her video, Edwards told Insider she received a notification that the listing was under contract, concluding a stark lesson for her client about the challenges of buying a home in 2022.